How can government services be more efficient than private services when government service provision is separated from the payment for them? The greatest Australian politician and journalist, Bert Kelly, when he was 72 wrote:

When I die, I hope people will remember me by the proverb: “You can always tell a man who is dining out on an expense account by the enthusiasm with which he summons the waiter.”

I care about kids. I am a father of two. The most important thing to me is not about us, but our kids and their education.

Education, ideally, helps kids to be independent. In modern society, however, education is not about helping our kids to be independent but to make them dependent on a grand illusion.Read the rest of this entry →

Do you enjoy riddles? This one challenges many students of liberty. Once we see the problem, lack of a solution will bedevil us until we can solve it logically to the satisfaction of our own conscience.

We want to answer this question: To what extent should politicians be enthroned to rule affairs in our daily lives? What should be the proper domain of political rulership — that is, government? Read the rest of this entry →

by Murray Rothbard, originally published in his For A New Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2006 [1973]), p. 84.

Let us try to transcend the fact that for as long as we can remember, the State has monopolized police and judicial services in society. Suppose that we were all starting completely from scratch, and that millions of us had been dropped down upon the earth, fully grown and developed, from some other planet. Debate begins as to how protection (police and judicial services) will be provided. Someone says:

Let’s all give all of our weapons to Joe Jones over there, and to his relatives. And let Jones and his family decide all disputes among us. In that way, the Joneses will be able to protect all of us from any aggression or fraud that anyone else may commit. With all the power and all the ability to make ultimate decisions on disputes in the hands of Jones, we will all be protected from one another. And then let us allow the Joneses to obtain their income from this great service by using their weapons, and by exacting as much revenue by coercion as they shall desire.

It is very important in these replies to people like Krugman that we don’t get involved in technical details, but ask them questions almost like a child:

Explain to me how increase in paper pieces can possibly make a society richer? If that were the case, explain to me why there is still poverty in the world? Isn’t every central bank in the world capable of printing as much paper as they want? And do you then think society as a whole would be richer? Read the rest of this entry →

The director of Mises Institute Brazil, Fernando Fiori Chiocca, explains the significance of the cover photo: “This can advance libertarianism as never before. Every single person that sees this image will want to know who the heck is this guy with a bow-tie and shorts and what he thinks. Then they will discover freedom.” Read the rest of this entry →

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Originally published in The Free Market, February 1988.

Compared with life in Western countries, where the socialist sector is sizeable, life under total socialism is miserable.

The standard of living is so deplorable that, in 1961, the socialist East German government built a system of walls, barbed wire, electrified fences, minefields, automatic shooting devices, watchtowers, watchdogs, and watchmen, almost 900 miles long, to keep people from running away from socialism.

The empirical evidence shows that socialism is an obvious failure. And the cause of socialism’s failure is crystal clear: there is almost no private ownership of the means of production, and almost all factors of production are owned in common in precisely the same way that Americans own the Postal Service.

Why, then, do seemingly serious people still advocate socialism? And why are there still thousands of social scientists who want to put more and more factors of production under social instead of private control? Read the rest of this entry →